Many therapists recognize that helping clients become aware of emotion is not the same as helping them fully experience it, express it, and make sense of it. Clients may even know that they are sad, angry, or afraid while still remaining distant from the experience; others may feel emotion intensely but struggle to put it into words or understand what it means. For therapists, the challenge is knowing how to respond moment by moment to help clients access, deepen, and differentiate emotional experience so that it becomes therapeutically useful.
Emotional awareness, expression, and reflection are three fundamental processes of therapeutic change across many approaches to psychotherapy. Awareness involves helping clients attend to, accept, and put words to what they are feeling. Expression involves helping clients fully experience and express previously avoided emotions. Reflection helps clients make sense of activated emotional experience, develop new meaning, and integrate it into evolving understandings of themselves and their relationships. While these processes are widely recognized as important, facilitating them moment by moment in therapy requires careful observation, refined clinical skill, and sensitivity to subtle changes in clients’ emotional processing.
Designed for psychotherapists from all theoretical orientations, this workshop provides an in-depth exploration of these universal therapeutic processes through detailed discussion and moment-by-moment analysis of psychotherapy videos. Participants will observe how experienced therapists facilitate emotional awareness, deepen emotional experiencing, support productive emotional expression, and use reflection to help clients develop new meaning and healthier identity and relationship narratives.
The workshop will also introduce the Emotional Arousal Scale and Experiencing Scale, two research-based measures that have been widely applied across psychotherapy research and can be used as observational tools for tracking clients’ emotional awareness and expression in session. By using these scales, participants can recognize subtle differences in clients’ emotional awareness and expression, enhancing moment-to-moment therapeutic attunement and intervention.
For therapists who are newer to EFT
With the purchase of this workshop, participants will automatically receive 2-month access to a 3-hour recorded workshop with Dr. Leslie Greenberg introducing Emotion Focused Therapy. We recommend watching this recorded workshop before attending as it reviews foundational knowledge and skills to work with emotion in psychotherapy.
Learning Objectives
In this workshop, participants will learn how to:
- Differentiate the processes of emotion awareness, expression, and reflection and understand how each contributes to emotional change.
- Recognize therapist micro-interventions that facilitate emotional awareness and deepen emotional experiencing.
- Promote productive emotional expression by activating and deepening emotional experience.
- Understand how reflection helps clients create new meaning and develop healthier identity and relationship narratives.
- Apply concepts from the Emotional Arousal Scale and Experiencing Scale to recognize subtle variations in clients’ emotional awareness and expression.
CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS (CECs)
Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA)
- Pending Approval
Ontario Association of Mental Health Professionals (OAMHP)
- Pending Approval
Canadian Psychological Association (CPA)
- Pending Approval
Ontario Psychological Association (OPA)
- Pending Approval
Please note that live attendance is required in order to receive CE credits
REFUND & CANCELLATION POLICY
Cancelling 7 days or more prior to the start of a live one or two day workshop, or webinar series:
Refund: Full refund will be processed, minus a $50 administrative fee
or
Transfer: Full payment can be transferred to another upcoming workshop or training that we provide. Please email our training and workshop team at training@greenbergiseft.ca to request a transfer.
Cancelling after 7 days prior to the start of a live one or two day workshop, or webinar series:
Refund: No refund
Transfers: Full payment can be transferred to another upcoming workshop or training that we provide. Please email our training and workshop team at training@greenbergiseft.ca to request a transfer.
